After suffering years of budget cutbacks because of a pension crisis, San Diego now faces a bigger financial challenge: how to deal with a sewage project that could cost even more money — up to $3.5 billion once interest is included.

The Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant is the last, big sewage-processing facility in the country that hasn’t met the federal standard of secondary treatment. Getting up to speed would cost $1.5 billion to $2 billion before interest charges, city officials said.

That kind of expense would likely trigger sewer rate hikes and service cuts in San Diego and the 16 cities and water agencies that use the Point Loma plant.

Yes
57% (1293)

No
43% (978)

2271 total votes.

After 20 years of securing waivers that have exempted San Diego from upgrading the facility, the city may not get another reprieve when its current permit expires in 2015.

San Diego officials’ leading strategy isn’t to sink a fortune into improving the plant, but to divert much of the wastewater to another site and purify it into tap water. Are San Diego’s residents and businesses ready to commit to this unusual form of water recycling? Are they comfortable with the idea of city officials turning wastewater into water for bathing, cooking and drinking?

“We have to decide as a community: Do we treat sewage and put it back into the ocean, or do we treat sewage and put it back into the potable water system?” said Marco Gonzalez, an attorney with the Coast Law Group who has participated in ongoing negotiations about the treatment-plant issue.

A 2012 report on water recycling, conducted as a condition for the most recent waiver, estimated that San Diego could reclaim more than 100 million gallons of wastewater per day for purification into drinking and irrigation water. Doing so would reduce the need for moving up to secondary treatment at the Point Loma facility.

This recycling concept, formally known as potable reuse, has slowly gained support from the San Diego City Council during the past decade. And a city-commissioned poll conducted this year by a San Diego State University researcher found that 73 percent of respondents support the conversion process — basically opposite the findings of a survey done in 2004.

Crisis causes delay

But discussions about establishing a full-scale water-recycling system, which would take years to complete, have stalled amid the city’s leadership turmoil stemming from sexual-harassment accusations against former Mayor Bob Filner. To compound the challenges, San Diego public utilities director Roger Bailey left his position in July.

Now that Filner has resigned, it will be months before his successor is elected and can assess where the wastewater issue ranks among many competing priorities.

In the meantime, environmental groups, various city officials and water regulators are beginning talks on options such as:

• proposing a scaled-down version of secondary treatment

• ordering another scientific study on how much pollution is currently caused by pumping the once-treated effluent out to sea

• applying for a new waiver, which would give the city five more years to determine its ultimate course